The Nickel Boys is based upon the real-life events surrounding the Dozier School. Also known as the Florida School for Boys, the Dozier School was a juvenile reformatory school that ran from 1900 to 2011. It closed after a 2009 state inspection led to a government investigation into the school's allegations of murder, abuse, and torture. The survivors of the school, who referred to themselves as the "White House Boys," had been utilizing the internet to publicly speak out about their experiences at the school, which eventually led to an expose in the St. Petersburg Times that detailed the various forms of abuse that the boys went through at the school. It was stated that there had been separate rooms for beating white boys and black boys, whippings with leather belts, and a supposed "rape room" where guards would sexually abuse the boys.
After the initial investigation began in 2009, further efforts on behalf of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice revealed and confirmed even more accounts of abuse. A forensic anthropology survey conducted by the University of South Florida in 2012 unearthed 55 bodies on the grounds of the school and nearly 100 deaths. 27 more graves were discovered in 2019, and some believe that there are many more than the currently documented total. Only in 2017 did the state hold an official ceremony to apologize to the victims, survivors, and families of survivors of the Dozier School.
The fictional parallels between Nickel Academy and the Dozier School are present throughout the novel. When Elwood is beaten, the novel describes how his beating was so severe that there were fibers from his jeans embedded into the flesh on his legs—a story that correlates exactly with one of the survivor's stories from the Dozier School. Although the boys in the novel are called the "Nickel Boys," the term that Whitehead utilizes for the shed where beating occur, the "White House," alludes to the moniker that the survivors of the Dozier School adopted: the White House Boys. Much of the violence in the novel is lifted directly from the testimonies of the White House Boys, making the novel an even more disturbing depiction of horror, evil, and human cruelty.
